The Boston Red Sox simply shrugged off their lead in the AL East dropping to four games over New York after they lost to left-hander Joe Saunders 3-1 on Sunday.
"If the Yankees win 20 in a row, they'll catch us," Mike Lowell said. "If every division winner got to the World Series it would mean something. But it doesn't mean anything" to finish in first.
Certain vinyl baby bibs sold at Toys “R” Us stores appear to be contaminated with lead, laboratory tests have shown, making the inexpensive bibs another example of a made-in-China product that may be a health hazard to children.The vinyl bibs, which feature illustrations of baseball bats and soccer balls and Disney’s Winnie the Pooh characters, are sold for less than $5 each under store brand labels, including Especially for Baby and Koala Baby.
Tests this summer, financed by the Center for Environmental Health of Oakland, Calif., found lead as high as three times the level allowed in paint in several styles of the bibs purchased from both Toys “R” Us and Babies “R” Us stores in California.
A separate test by a laboratory hired by The New York Times of the same Toys “R” Us bibs, purchased in Maryland, found a similar level of contamination.
An Israeli woman was astounded to find a tattoo- sticker of a Nazi soldier inside a pack of bubble gum she had bought at her local store, Maariv daily reported recently.
"A surprise awaits you," said the "Roll Bubble Gum" pack, showing a picture of a pink wrapper alongside what it said was the sticker, which showed a Nazi officer in uniform and wearing a swastika armband. ...The newspaper quoted Orna Gutman, 23, as telling its website the pack's label was in Arabic and English and stated the gum was made in China but did not name the importer.
We don't need more ambulance chasers. We don't need frivolous lawsuits. And we don't need attorneys making people's lives miserable when they go to family court for divorces," said Rep. Frank Lasee, R-Green Bay. "And I think that having too many attorneys leads to all those bad results.
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Imports of five species of farmed Chinese seafood will be detained until they can be shown free of potentially dangerous antibiotics, federal health officials said Thursday.
The Food and Drug Administration said it would detain the catfish, basa, shrimp, dace and eel after repeated testing has turned up contamination with drugs unapproved in the United States for use in farmed seafood.
"It can be said that the quality of China's exports all are guaranteed," Wang Xinpei, a spokesman for the Chinese Commerce Ministry.
The statement was among Beijing's most public assertions of the safety of its exports since they came under scrutiny earlier this year with the deaths of dog and cats in North America blamed on Chinese wheat gluten tainted with the chemical melamine.
Since then, U.S. authorities have turned away or recalled toxic fish, juice containing unsafe color additives and popular toy trains decorated with lead paint.
Chinese-made toothpaste also has been banned by numerous countries in North and South America and Asia for containing diethylene glycol, or DEG, a chemical often found in antifreeze. It is also a low-cost — and sometimes deadly — substitute for glycerin, a sweetener in many drugs.
On Wednesday, three Japanese importers recalled millions of Chinese-made travel toothpaste sets, many sold to inns and hotels, after they were found to contain as much as 6.2 percent of diethylene glycol.
Wang, the Commerce Ministry spokesman, said Chinese experts have already "explained the situation."
He gave no details, although the country's quality watchdog has in past cited tests from 2000 that it said showed toothpaste containing less than 15.6 percent diethylene glycol was harmless to humans.
The New York Times reported early Thursday that about 900,000 tubes of tainted Chinese toothpaste have been distributed in the United States, showing up in correctional facilities and some hospitals.
Officials in Georgia and North Carolina told The Times there had been no illnesses reported, and that the toothpaste in question was being replaced with brands not manufactured in China.
Earlier this month, a spokesman for North Carolina's Department of Correction said Pacific brand toothpaste was distributed to prisoners who could not afford to buy a name brand at prison stores. The tubes were taken away after trace amounts of DEG was found in them.
Also Thursday, state media said Beijing police raided a village where live pigs were force-fed wastewater to boost their weight before slaughter, underscoring the country's chronic food safety problems.
Plastic pipes had been forced down the pigs' throats and villagers had pumped each 220-pound pig with 44 pounds of wastewater, the Beijing Morning Post reported.
Paperwork showed the pigs were headed for one of Beijing's main slaughterhouses and stamps on their ears indicated that they already had been through quarantine and inspection, the paper said. Suspects escaped during Wednesday's raid and no arrests were made, it said.
The case underscored China's chaotic food safety situation, where manufacturers and distributors often use unapproved additives, falsify expiration dates or find other methods of cutting corners to eke out small profits.
Earlier this week, inspectors announced they had closed 180 food factories nationwide in the first half of this year and seized tons of candy, pickles, crackers and seafood tainted with formaldehyde, illegal dyes and industrial wax.
"These are not isolated cases," Han Yi, an official with the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, was quoted as saying in Wednesday's state-run China Daily newspaper.
Han's admission was significant because the agency has said in the past that safety violations were the work of a few rogue operators — a claim aimed at protecting China's billions of dollars of food exports.
A New Jersey importer has asked the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for help in recalling about 450,000 light-truck tires made in China after a fatal rollover crash. ...The Chinese are giving free trade a bad name.
Foreign Tire Sales told U.S. safety officials tires sold under the names Westlake, Telluride, Compass and YKS could fail at highway speeds. It also told federal officials at least six other U.S. distributors had sold tires of similar construction by the same manufacturer.
The researchers discovered that the Internet consists of a dense, heavily connected nucleus of about 100 nodes, including Google and U.S. telecommunications giant ATT WorldNet. Surrounding this core was a region they called the 'peer-connected' component, which is able to connect to the bulk of the Internet without causing congestion in the nucleus. It is possible for data to get between any two points in the peer-connected component within about four links. The final, outermost layer is more sparsely connected, and must travel through the nucleus to reach other nodes.
In a somewhat strange deal with network television's NBC Universal, MumboJumbo games has licensed the rights to "The Office" which will be recreated as a casual video game. The plan is to turn The Office into a inexpensive game where players must finish odd jobs around the office as well as join in office pranks.Link to the full article.
It is unusual for congressional job approval ratings to be at or below 24%. Congress has been rated this negatively only a few times in the four decades Gallup has measured this item -- in 1979, during the energy crisis; at several points during the "term limits era" of 1990 to 1994; and last year.That low, and they have only just begun their orgy of spending and taxing.
[T]he power surge when people switched their lights back on could cause disruptions in supply and even endanger hospital patients on life support machines.If the artist are truly concerned about energy use, shouldn't they be playing on acoustic instruments? They probably shouldn't broadcast the event either, that only encourages people to burn electricity when they turn on their televisions, radios, and internets.
Rep. Rob Bishop [R-UT]: Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
I rise in support of H.R. 759, which has been well explained by the subcommittee chairman. We support the designation of the Bob Hope Memorial Library. We urge the adoption of this particular bill.
In 1940, Bob Hope starred, with Paulette Goddard and Richard Carlson, in a remake of the movie "The Ghost Breakers." In that picture, as they are talking about zombies that would be attacking the house that is owned by Paulette Goddard, she said, "Zombies! That's horrible." Richard Carlson said, "It's worse than horrible because a zombie has no will of his own. You see them sometimes walking around blindly with dead eyes, following orders, not knowing what they do, not caring." At which time Bob Hope said, "Oh, you mean like Democrats."
I am very grateful that the other side of the aisle has taken this opportunity to recognize and reward both the wit and the wisdom of Bob Hope with this piece of legislation. I firmly support it.
Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
The scam was uncovered when Japanese moviestar Maiko Kawamaki went on a talk-show and wondered why her new pet would not bark or eat dog food. ... One couple said they became suspicious when they took their "dog" to have its claws trimmed and were told it had hooves.Read the original article here.
The New York Yankees will win a whopping 110 games this season, more than any other major league team, according to a mathematician who applies math to real-life situations.Using his computer model, he also discovered that in order to maximize runs, pitchers should bat eighth in the order, rather than ninth.
DocuTicker offers a hand-picked selection of resources, reports and publications from government agencies, NGOs, think tanks and other public interest organizations.I'm not wild about its font and colors (I suppose it is better than his old website, Direct Search) but it is a good reference source nonetheless. It is browsable by various categories.
(... in Concord, N.H., Friday, March 30, 2007. (AP Photo/Jim Cole)"We were paying about 12 percent of our revenues, so that came out to be about $48,000 on $400,000 in revenues,� says Paul Maloney, editor of RAIN: Radio and Internet Newsletter, and VP of music programming at Chicago-based Internet radio service, AccuRadio.'This decision has us paying per performance, so, for 2006, that is going to increase our royalty obligation to about $600,000. That is 150 percent of our revenues�'"Hat Tip: Hip Hop Libertarian.
"Bookmarks are now easier. We've moved your Bookmarks to the "My Quicklinks" menu at the top left of your page."But they weren't easier. Now you have to click a drop menu and the first page view of bookmarks aren't my own bookmarks, but links to Yahoo services.
Zhao Baige, deputy minister in charge of [China's cabinet-level National Population and Family Planning Commission], said a new population policy is being considered, hinting that China might relax its three-decades-old one-child policy.This sounds as though China will replace its policy of forced abortions with a new national breeding program.
A major principle of the new policy would shift the emphasis from quantity control to focus on quality improvement, Zhao said.
